Growing a Better Future

Broken food system and environmental crises
spell hunger for millions.

A broken food system and environmental crises are now reversing decades of progress against hunger according to new Oxfam analysis. Spiralling food prices and endless cycles of regional food crises will create millions more hungry people unless we transform the way we grow and share food. Oxfam launches, in June 2011, a global campaign to ensure everyone has enough to eat always.

Growing a Better Future, catalogues the symptoms of today’s broken food system: growing hunger, flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water and rising food prices. It warns we have entered a new age of crisis where depletion of the earth’s natural resources and increasingly severe climate change impacts will create millions more hungry people.

New research predicts that the price of staple foods such as maize, already at an all time high, will more than double in the next 20 years. Up to half of this increase will be due to climate change. The world’s poorest people who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food will be hardest hit.

Eight million people face chronic food shortages in East Africa today. Increasing numbers of regional and local crises could see demand for food aid double in the next 10 years.

By 2050 demand for food will rise 70 per cent yet our capacity to increase food production is declining. The average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990 and is set to decline to a fraction of one percent in the next decade."

The report, in full, can be downloaded at the link below, right.

Editor's Note

The National Council for Science and the Environment will present its 12th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment: Environment and Security, January 18-20, 2012 in Washington, DC. Food Security is one of the Conference's Themes.